Posted by Sue Leonard on Wednesday 22nd July 2020
With the 2020 festival cancelled, I’m wishing I was in Bantry, and am remembering last year. Roll on July 2021!
HERE ARE THE 12 THINGS I LEARNED:
1. John Boyne auditioned for Boyzone – and only then applied to do an MFA in Creative Writing.
2. Kit De Waal didn’t, voluntarily, read a book until she was 22.
3. When Patrick Gale’s mother discovered a stash of love letters,written to her husband by his best friend – and learned they had spent the night before her marriage together – she kept quiet, and never told him that he was rumbled.
4. Gin tastes amazing with elder-flower tonic water.
5. To get into character, Craig Davidson took steroids, and ‘lost,’ a couple of boxing fights.
6. If you want to run in the morning, you shouldn’t have that third gin.
7. Cherie Dimakine has reason to be grateful to Donald Trump. Her brilliant, dystopian coming of age novel, set in the indigenous community in Canada, has been a best seller in America, because with their current president in power, Americans think the world might end any day now.
8. Anjali Joseph has wanted to be a writer since she was two years old.
9. When Mark Boyle – the guy living with no technology, no electricity and no running water – goes to a literary festival, and stays in a good hotel, he takes a shower, but doesn’t use the free gratis shampoo or soap.
10. the chipper in Bantry does positively THE best chips in County Cork.
11. West Cork audiences ask the best questions. They seem to know the difference between a comment and a question.
12. Those pesky head sets sometimes fall off. Thank you, Patrick Gale, for rescuing me!
